How to Start a Reading Revolution

How to start a reading revolution
I am really excited about my BBC challenge to inspire a genuine love of reading in a Cardiff school
by Michael Rosen

Over the last 10 years, listening to teachers and visiting primary schools, I've seen a slow but steady change in the way books are read – or not read. While "reading" and "literacy" have been made into a top priority, reading books has been sidelined.

In practice, it means that a great deal of energy, money and focus have been put into teaching children how to read, while older children are given excerpts from books to read and then be quizzed about. It's quite possible to find primary schools where older children don't have the experience of reading a whole book, of talking about it in an open-ended way. In such schools, the library may be not much more than a corner in a corridor; visits to the local library may be non-existent; local writers and people who work with the printed word may never visit the school.

There is no requirement from Ofsted or anyone else that these book-loving practices should be in place – there isn't a category on the Ofsted checklist for assessing whether books have an important place in a school or not.

Books are low-tech, portable packages of the widest range of human experience, presented in a format which gives time to grasp complex ideas or to spend time in imaginative worlds. Children who "get" the reading thing have the best possible platform for "getting" the trick of school learning, as well as a resource for the rest of their lives.

This makes the current situation, with "reading" compulsory, but reading books optional, discriminatory. If schools don't make books important then children who come from homes with no books, and who don't visit libraries, will never find their way into this vital way of presenting ideas, feelings and knowledge.

But just how difficult would it be to get schools currently teaching "literacy" to teach a genuine love of reading instead? The BBC challenged me to turn an ordinary school, that was doing all the right things as far as "literacy" was concerned, into a book-loving school in 10 weeks.

You can see how I got on this Sunday on BBC 4. I'll say now that it "wasn't about me". It's about the teachers in the school. If you say to teachers, how can we, with the resources we've got here, develop a policy on reading books, then within minutes, people have ideas, make plans, invent activities. It's as if these wellsprings of teachers' creativity have been held in aspic for the last 15 years.

For me, and I hope the viewer, one of the most exciting things about this BBC project was to see the teachers enjoy the freedom of being able to transform children's lives. I hope Ed Balls and Jim Knight will be watching.


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Note: Michael Rosen is the Children's Laureate in the UK. Visit his website here.
Ofsted is the Office For Standards in EDuctation. You can find more about them here.
Ed Balls is Edward Michael "Ed" Balls, a Labour and Co-operative MP for the West Yorkshire constituency of Normanton and has been the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families since 2007.
Jim Knight is a Labour Party MP who, since 2007, has been the Minister fo State for Schools and Learners in the Department for Children, Schools and Families.